Big Grove Brewery Heads to Kansas City, Seeks 100-Plus Hires for May Opening

The Brookfield Room in downtown Kansas City opened its doors to applicants this morning as Big Grove Brewery launched a three-day hiring drive for its first Kansas location. Over 100 positions need to be filled before training begins in early May and the taproom opens later that month at The Shops of Prairie Village, occupying roughly 12,000 square feet at the corner of West 71st Street and Mission Road, inside the redeveloped former Macy's that sat vacant for more than a decade.

The roles on the table are culinary, taproom host, and management, and Big Grove is explicitly seeking "food lovers" and "beer aficionados." That phrasing signals something real. Big Grove runs a pilot brewing system at each of its locations, dedicated to producing R&D beers served only on-site, a setup that is meaningfully different from the single house lager a restaurant-first operation tacks onto an otherwise wine-and-cocktail menu. For applicants with all-grain homebrew experience or fermentation knowledge, the pilot system is the place to look first in any interview. If the answer to "who owns the tap list decision?" points to a culinary team rather than a head brewer, that tells you exactly where beer sits in the hierarchy.

Big Grove's track record gives the pilot system credibility. Easy Eddy, the brewery's flagship hazy IPA, is a US Open Beer Championship gold medal winner and the best-selling IPA in Iowa. The Festbier märzen earned a silver medal at the Great American Beer Festival. Citrus Surfer, now a multi-variant brand, was developed through ten concept batches on the Solon pilot system before scaling to full production. A new-market taproom under this model does not just serve the core lineup from Iowa; it creates immediate runway for Kansas City-specific recipes and, eventually, local collaboration brews.

Andrew Loudon, Store Director for the Prairie Village location and himself a recent hire tasked with building the team from the ground up, framed the stakes plainly. "Opening a new location at The Shops of Prairie Village is an incredible chapter for Big Grove and a wonderful opportunity to become a valued part of this community," Loudon said. "We look forward to welcoming new team members as we prepare to open and get ready for an exciting summer for Big Grove, Prairie Village, and the greater Kansas City market."

The context makes the launch both harder and more consequential. Three Kansas City-area breweries closed recently with no new craft beer businesses opening to replace them, the first such stretch since 2010 according to the KC Business Journal. Prairie Village has never had its own brewery. Big Grove CEO and co-founder Matt Swift said the company spent two years scouting Kansas City and Omaha before committing to this corner, drawn by the walkable character and foot traffic it clocked even in winter.

The hiring drive continues Tuesday, April 7, from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. and wraps Wednesday, April 8, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., all at The Brookfield Room in Kansas City. All positions are open-interview with no appointment required, covering full- and part-time roles, and online applications are available for anyone who cannot attend in person.

One longer-horizon detail worth noting: Big Grove recently launched an ownership program giving store directors the chance to buy equity stakes in their taprooms. Three Iowa directors have already entered the program. Whether that path extends to Prairie Village hires is the question that separates a long-term craft beer career from a well-compensated hospitality job.